We DIDN’T TRY most of the war criminals that were left. Every one of the SS soldiers involved in the Malmedy Massacre eventually went free with the heaviest sentence about 10 years for their leader, Siep Detrich (Blowtorch Division).
See Richard Gallagher’s book “Massacre at Malmedy” for the details. My friend was one of Patton’s intelligence officers who interrogated the Malmedy murderers, for which he was wrongly and irresponsibly harassed by Sen. Joe McCarthy (who bought the German-American Bundists propaganda lies about the interrogations).
Many other SS and Gestapo agents escaped any justice and even lived openly in Germany. Some even became cabinet ministers in the Communist East German government (SS Sturmfurher Ernest Grossmann, Deputy Commandant of Sachsenhausen slave labor/concentration camp), among others). The Russians wouldn’t give them up and we stopped trying to get them despite the massive evidence against them for war crimes.
The British were a little better, esp. killing Japanese war criminals in the Malaysia/Singapore theater for their atrocities. We did little to kill Japanese war criminals in the Phillipines, which was a national disgrace and a betrayal of the one million Filipinos who were slaughtered (Over 30,000 died on the Bataan Death March and in the camps. We lost about 10,000 and none of them were properly avenged).
We could have smashed the concentration camps, bombing their SS headquarters, blowing down fences and guard towers, destroying rail lines, etc. We didn’t, and my relatived died because of it (Belzec and Auschwitz).
A little more knowledge about history would help in discussing this issue.
By the way, another friend was a US military judge in post-war Germany and he did sentence convicted war criminals, spies, etc. to the max. Unfortunately those above on the Nuremburg Tribunal lost sight of how many war criminals there were and those only prosecuted a few at the top.
By the way, among my friends was one of the heads of the Polish Free Army; a young teenager from the Warsaw ghetto; another young teenager who worked with the Partisans in Yugoslavia; another man who once dealt with Eichmann regarding another matter (he was the Malmedy investigator later); B-25 pilots, and RAF pilots. Even knew a British commando who was Jewish. He and some friends did a little SS and Gestapo hunting at the end of war and beyond. They knew how to bring justice to the Nazi scum and did.
America never really knew how to clean out the Nazi house after the war. The Russians, on the other hand, executed them by the thousands, while recruiting some of the SS and Gestapo for the KGB. At least they killed some of the bastards.
WW2 was a very complicated war and they are still finding new information about Japanese war crimes and more Nazi killing fields.
My personal position would have been (had I been old enough to have been in WW2) would have been to kill all SS and Gestapo found. They deserved every bullet we could have put into them. The same for the Japanese. You don’t let feral animals escape.